Latest / Spiritual Hot Sauce / "The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil : What Was It? | The Deep End Series" Ep# 46

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"The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil : What Was It? | The Deep End Series" Ep# 46 · Spiritual Hot Sauce

0:00
Chris Jones: You've heard me talk about many times the tree of knowledge of good and evil and how a serpent would give us a fruit that is the poison to humanity.
0:09
Chris Jones: Today we dive into that.
0:11
Chris Jones: We also announced some big changes.
0:15
Chris Jones: Welcome.
0:16
Chris Jones: I'm Chris Jones, and this is Spiritual Hot Sauce.
0:23
Chris Jones: Big news today.
0:25
Chris Jones: We got big changes coming here at Spiritual Hot Sauce.
0:28
Chris Jones: But before we get into that, I want to answer a question that Susan and Ryan Ingler had.
0:33
Chris Jones: In episode three of Rebuilding Faith, I had said that the tree of knowledge of good and evil would give us a fruit that is the poison to humanity, that it's in the ideology of how we define good and evil is what creates a lot of our suffering.
0:48
Chris Jones: Now, the question Susan Ingler had was this What is the tree of knowledge of good and evil?
0:54
Chris Jones: Was it a physical tree or is it something that was metaphorical?
0:58
Chris Jones: Now, nobody knows for sure exactly what it is, but some believe it represents the age of accountability, understanding right and wrong, that when Adam and Eve realized that they were naked, they had become accountable.
1:14
Chris Jones: Now, I gotta be honest, I really don't think that's correct.
1:17
Chris Jones: And the reason why I don't believe that's correct is because it don't really line up with everything else and how it presents.
1:24
Chris Jones: I mean, to me, and there's a couple of different ways it could be, but they lead to the same place.
1:29
Chris Jones: I think that one of the things this could represent is how we move from a hunter-gatherer into a society.
1:36
Chris Jones: Now, when I first heard this, I really kind of rejected it until I gave it some thought.
1:41
Chris Jones: I think when we hear hunter-gatherer, we just assume they are intellectually inferior to us.
1:47
Chris Jones: But what we have found is hunter-gatherers actually had bigger brains than we do, and their brains functioned like ours do.
1:56
Chris Jones: So what does that mean?
1:59
Chris Jones: It's actually being debated right now amongst academics that hunter-gatherers may have been smarter than us.
2:06
Chris Jones: Weird, right?
2:07
Chris Jones: But when we think of smart, we think of IQ.
2:11
Chris Jones: But that's because we misunderstand what an IQ test actually measures.
2:16
Chris Jones: What it actually measures is abstract thinking in Western culture.
2:21
Chris Jones: There was a study done back in 1970 by a doctor Michael Cole.
2:26
Chris Jones: He went to West Africa and found the Capell people, and the Capell people lived more of a rudimentary life.
2:32
Chris Jones: They weren't in a modern-day social construct.
2:35
Chris Jones: Now, he gave them this IQ test to see how they would do, and they failed miserably.
2:40
Chris Jones: And he knew that it couldn't be accurate.
2:42
Chris Jones: That couldn't be right.
2:43
Chris Jones: However, when he repeated the test, they scored the same, which was an indicator that something is wrong.
2:49
Chris Jones: Now, one of the questions that kind of represents the overall test, it was asking to match the items.
2:57
Chris Jones: And they had a potato, a knife, and another tool.
3:00
Chris Jones: I'm not even sure what the other tool was, but the answer was to group all of the tools together.
3:05
Chris Jones: And they were taking and pairing the knife with the potato.
3:10
Chris Jones: Using that kind of logic was dramatically dropping their scores.
3:13
Chris Jones: Now he went back home, he thought about this, and he felt like the whole thing was skewed.
3:19
Chris Jones: So he decided to go back and retest everybody, except for this time he gave them the direction of when you answer, answer how a fool would answer.
3:29
Chris Jones: And this time, they matched the knife with the other tool, which dramatically improved their scores.
3:36
Chris Jones: See, in functioning life, we know that a knife does match with a potato.
3:40
Chris Jones: That makes perfect sense.
3:41
Chris Jones: When you start matching tools to tools, you're thinking like you would in a society.
3:46
Chris Jones: We have been trained to think that way.
3:49
Chris Jones: We naturally think like the Capel people, which is how a hunter-gatherer would think.
3:54
Chris Jones: If you are a hunter gatherer in the Garden of Eden, you don't know what ownership is.
4:00
Chris Jones: You don't think selfishly as in me.
4:02
Chris Jones: You don't think about power or money or greed.
4:06
Chris Jones: You think about community.
4:07
Chris Jones: I mean, Adam and Eve represents what the hunter-gatherer was, which is a good steward.
4:14
Chris Jones: They lived in balance with everything in themselves and one another.
4:18
Chris Jones: They took care of everything that had need as the need was their own, with bigger brains than us.
4:25
Chris Jones: I think what's happened is over time we developed a social construct, emergent society.
4:31
Chris Jones: And I think that's what the tree of knowledge of good and evil represents of how we constructed our emergent society.
4:40
Chris Jones: I mean, think of it like this: our first written word was a pictograph.
4:44
Chris Jones: It was an image of communicating something to people who couldn't speak the same languages.
4:50
Chris Jones: It came out of establishing a social construct, society.
4:55
Chris Jones: It was beer, goats, and wheat for trading in Mesopotamia.
5:00
Chris Jones: And ultimately, that's all a social construct or society is.
5:04
Chris Jones: It's just an overgrown market that has become exceptionally elaborate.
5:09
Chris Jones: I mean, we have an education system that is built around just helping us to be able to function in this society that we live in.
5:18
Chris Jones: I get that some of you might push back and say a modern society brings a higher quality of life and better health.
5:25
Chris Jones: I would argue that point.
5:27
Chris Jones: Did you know hunter-gatherers had the same lifespan as us?
5:30
Chris Jones: Except they were functioning up until the time of their death, fully functioning.
5:35
Chris Jones: It's like they just ran out of gas.
5:37
Chris Jones: That's kind of how they passed.
5:39
Chris Jones: We today go through this huge decline where we become feeble and weaker and weaker and sicker until we finally pass away.
5:46
Chris Jones: There wasn't a lot of suffering in how they did it.
5:49
Chris Jones: Now, the only caveat to that is you had to get past 10 years old.
5:53
Chris Jones: Now, there was a higher mortality rate.
5:55
Chris Jones: Survival of the fittest was in full swing.
5:58
Chris Jones: But once they got past that, they were fine.
6:01
Chris Jones: I mean, keep in mind, modern medicines treat modern problems that come from living in a modern society.
6:08
Chris Jones: Cancer, they wouldn't even know what that is.
6:10
Chris Jones: Heart disease, they really wouldn't know what that was.
6:12
Chris Jones: They wouldn't know what high blood pressures.
6:13
Chris Jones: All of the problems that come from living under our stress, that's an unnatural environment for us, they didn't have.
6:21
Chris Jones: They wouldn't have had any need for modern medicine, or very little.
6:25
Chris Jones: They wouldn't know what processed foods are.
6:27
Chris Jones: They wouldn't know what it means to have a poisoned water supply.
6:31
Chris Jones: Now, how does all of this tie into Adam and Eve and the serpent and the tree of knowledge of good and evil?
6:37
Chris Jones: Now, this is where it could go either way.
6:39
Chris Jones: And I'm going to give you my second idea of the theory of what this could mean.
6:44
Chris Jones: Because I think Adam and Eve, in one way or the other, they either represent going from a hunter-gatherer into emergent society, or they represent that Adam and Eve was a beautiful, wonderful society that had merged correctly, and that later on there was another element, a serpent that came in and gave us the poison that would bring suffering into us.
7:08
Chris Jones: So let me answer that by bringing us in this direction.
7:13
Chris Jones: We live and have always lived in a society that is based on trade.
7:19
Chris Jones: That's the social construct.
7:20
Chris Jones: It's the market.
7:21
Chris Jones: That's exactly what it is.
7:23
Chris Jones: If cash flow stops tomorrow at noon, then our society collapses tomorrow at noon.
7:27
Chris Jones: It is based on cash flow.
7:29
Chris Jones: We confuse humanity with the social construct.
7:34
Chris Jones: There are two different things.
7:36
Chris Jones: The social construct is like a trellis, it just supports humanity so we can trade outside of our immediate group.
7:44
Chris Jones: However, we have prioritized the social construct over humanity.
7:50
Chris Jones: And by forcing humanity to fit into such a society is what has caused us all the suffering that we have.
7:58
Chris Jones: Now, what has allowed us to put trade in society over humanity?
8:04
Chris Jones: It goes back to the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
8:07
Chris Jones: It's how we define good and evil, right and wrong.
8:11
Chris Jones: So now let me bring us all up to speed.
8:13
Chris Jones: Now, the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve in that garden either represent hunter-gatherers.
8:18
Chris Jones: Now you got to keep in mind, hunter-gatherers were much more developed than what we've kind of always thought.
8:24
Chris Jones: Or Eden represents a beautiful society that is in communion with God, that has a proper balance and experiences life as it was meant to be for us.
8:36
Chris Jones: And that Adam and Eve represents the leadership of that society.
8:40
Chris Jones: Now, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, a serpent would give us a fruit from it that would become the poison to humanity.
8:48
Chris Jones: What does that mean, Chris?
8:49
Chris Jones: Because I say that often and I know I do.
8:51
Chris Jones: Now, first of all, when you hear fruit and fruit tree and all of this, it represents something that came from a seed that's been developed, that's grown, and become something that is passed on.
9:03
Chris Jones: It's like when we talk about the gospel in the New Testament, that is always spoken of as in a seed and in a fruit, that we all receive the seed and we have to cultivate that, let it grow in us as it matures and it comes to fruition, it becomes fully synthesized, we become fruit-bearing.
9:22
Chris Jones: And that fruit is a seed.
9:24
Chris Jones: And when someone takes that fruit, they have the opportunity to take that seed and grow that in themselves.
9:31
Chris Jones: Now, typically, a fruit like that represents ideology.
9:35
Chris Jones: So it means that it's been a fully synthesized, brought to fruition, something that started as a seed that is matured and came to fruition that is a fruit.
9:46
Chris Jones: They were warned by God not to take that fruit, but yet we took the fruit.
9:51
Chris Jones: And in that fruit, we would learn suffering.
9:54
Chris Jones: In other words, it was a poisoned ideology.
9:57
Chris Jones: But once we got that ideology in us, we couldn't get it out.
10:01
Chris Jones: All right, so let's get into this.
10:03
Chris Jones: How did we get this fruit, this ideology of good and evil, a perverted one and to us?
10:10
Chris Jones: In Genesis chapter 3, it gives us the account.
10:13
Chris Jones: Eve is in the garden.
10:14
Chris Jones: She is in Eden.
10:15
Chris Jones: She's walking around and we would say in her society or hunter-gatherer, however you see it.
10:21
Chris Jones: Now it says the serpent, Aster, how come you don't take this fruit?
10:26
Chris Jones: Why don't you eat of that tree?
10:27
Chris Jones: In other words, why don't you use this ideology?
10:31
Chris Jones: And Eve quotes God.
10:33
Chris Jones: She says, Because when we eat that fruit, we will die.
10:35
Chris Jones: Now we've always been taught that the serpent lies to her and says, You won't die.
10:41
Chris Jones: Now that is true.
10:42
Chris Jones: But what we don't do is we don't say, but there was a second lie that the serpent told Eve.
10:47
Chris Jones: We always say that the second thing he said was a truth, but it wasn't a truth.
10:51
Chris Jones: It's still a deceitful lie, which is where our confusion comes in.
10:55
Chris Jones: Let me show you what I mean.
10:56
Chris Jones: The serpent says, You won't die.
10:59
Chris Jones: And then he tells her something else.
11:00
Chris Jones: In fact, you will be like God.
11:03
Chris Jones: You will know the difference between good and evil.
11:07
Chris Jones: For some reason, we always think that part is true, but it's not.
11:12
Chris Jones: That is also a deceitful lie.
11:15
Chris Jones: The serpent didn't say anything that was true.
11:18
Chris Jones: Number one, you will die.
11:20
Chris Jones: And not just a physical death, everything beautiful in your life will die.
11:25
Chris Jones: How you interact with the garden, the ecosystem, the balance, the stewardship, your kinship with everything around you, how you live your life and experience it, the communion you have with God.
11:38
Chris Jones: Everything in your life that is beautiful will be taken from you through your own choices.
11:44
Chris Jones: And from these choices, you will get suffering.
11:47
Chris Jones: So that's the first lie.
11:48
Chris Jones: The second one we always think is true.
11:51
Chris Jones: It's not true.
11:52
Chris Jones: It's still a deceitful lie.
11:53
Chris Jones: The serpent says, You will be like God.
11:56
Chris Jones: You will know the difference between good and evil.
11:59
Chris Jones: But that's a lie.
12:00
Chris Jones: Because that's not true.
12:01
Chris Jones: She doesn't see good and evil like God does.
12:04
Chris Jones: They already see good like God does.
12:07
Chris Jones: The life they're experiencing is good.
12:11
Chris Jones: Think of it like this: Adam is naked and he communes with God every night in the cool of the evening.
12:17
Chris Jones: He would walk with God in communion.
12:20
Chris Jones: What does that mean?
12:21
Chris Jones: That he's naked with God.
12:23
Chris Jones: It means there is no shame, there is no restriction.
12:26
Chris Jones: It is full communion with God.
12:29
Chris Jones: It's like a father with his child.
12:32
Chris Jones: There is no need for the child to hide or be shameful.
12:35
Chris Jones: It is just love.
12:37
Chris Jones: That's what Adam knew.
12:39
Chris Jones: He just knew love and acceptance.
12:41
Chris Jones: But after the fruit, after taking that ideology, that's when Adam has to hide in shame and in guilt.
12:52
Chris Jones: Now he knows suffering.
12:54
Chris Jones: He doesn't know full acceptance with God, nor will he ever again know full acceptance of God, nor will his descendants know that acceptance with God, that communion.
13:06
Chris Jones: But Chris, I mean, we do know the difference between good and evil.
13:10
Chris Jones: No, we don't.
13:11
Chris Jones: I mean, Jesus points this out to us in the Good Samaritan.
13:14
Chris Jones: A lot of you have heard me talk about this.
13:16
Chris Jones: And if you want to know the full depth of that teaching, that understanding, go listen to episode 11, becoming the antidote to the poison.
13:24
Chris Jones: But briefly, Jesus says that we see good and evil or right and wrong as either or, that we either see it where we hurt other people and we do what we want based on what we want.
13:36
Chris Jones: That's bad.
13:37
Chris Jones: Then we all define bad or evil in that way: selfishness, pride, and greed.
13:42
Chris Jones: And that we and our social construct and our laws of society and how we have been taught to think, we define good as refraining from hurting other people and perpetrating evil on others.
13:56
Chris Jones: And Jesus says that's not good, although you define it as good, but that's just refraining from hurting other people.
14:04
Chris Jones: Good is giving to other people when they have need, like Adam and Eve did prior to the fruit.
14:12
Chris Jones: They were good stewards.
14:14
Chris Jones: See, that's what the Samaritan is in the story of the Good Samaritan.
14:18
Chris Jones: The Samaritan represents Adam pre-fruit, before that ideology that brought us suffering.
14:26
Chris Jones: Jesus represents the correction of that ideology.
14:31
Chris Jones: See, Jesus didn't come to start a social construct or a kingdom here on earth.
14:37
Chris Jones: He says that.
14:38
Chris Jones: You know, what is he tempted with when he goes out into the wilderness?
14:42
Chris Jones: He is tempted to be ruler of all social constructs.
14:46
Chris Jones: Jesus rejects that.
14:48
Chris Jones: Why?
14:49
Chris Jones: Because what Jesus gives us will work in any social construct.
14:53
Chris Jones: It's not about building a social construct, it's about us becoming something that works in any social construct, which takes us to a much more beautiful and balanced way of living, that we become the antidote to the poison that's in humanity.
15:12
Chris Jones: No amount of laws will get us closer to a utopian society.
15:16
Chris Jones: It's the opposite.
15:17
Chris Jones: We, the citizens, have to antiquate the laws and move us closer to a utopian society by how we interact with one another.
15:27
Chris Jones: Paul uses the word fruit too.
15:28
Chris Jones: It's in Galatians 5, 22, and 23, where he talks about the fruits of the Spirit, that the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness.
15:38
Chris Jones: And again, the fruit is the manifestation of the seed of what's been growing in you.
15:43
Chris Jones: Once you mature and come to fruition of what you're supposed to be, then that's the fruit you bear, like the good Samaritan, like a good steward, that you give on need versus deserve, because that's what Jesus did.
15:57
Chris Jones: He went about doing good according to Acts 1038.
16:01
Chris Jones: That we become like Jesus.
16:04
Chris Jones: We are the fruit of Jesus.
16:06
Chris Jones: As we become like him in his love as a disciple, not a worshiper, we are the attributes of him, his fruit, which means we carry on what he started.
16:20
Chris Jones: And what does Paul say?
16:22
Chris Jones: There is no law against this.
16:24
Chris Jones: In other words, this will fit into any society.
16:28
Chris Jones: The kingdom of heaven is in us.
16:31
Chris Jones: And when the kingdom of heaven comes to fruition, that's the fruit it bears, the mercy of God.
16:38
Chris Jones: And I want to go back to when Adam and Eve eat the fruit.
16:41
Chris Jones: What they learn is suffering.
16:44
Chris Jones: They don't learn good and evil.
16:46
Chris Jones: They learn evil and they learn a new definition of good, like I just defined it.
16:50
Chris Jones: What's good for me as long as it doesn't hurt you?
16:53
Chris Jones: Jesus says that's a perverted version.
16:56
Chris Jones: What's true is good is taking care of others when they can't take care of themselves.
17:01
Chris Jones: Has nothing to do with refraining from hurting other people.
17:04
Chris Jones: It has to do with leaning outward and helping other people.
17:07
Chris Jones: Two different things.
17:09
Chris Jones: But in that fall of experiencing evil when they learn shame and they learn guilt and they're hiding from God and they take fig leaves to try to cover themselves, they are no longer in communion with God.
17:23
Chris Jones: That's what that means.
17:25
Chris Jones: However, God says, here, let me help you.
17:29
Chris Jones: Let me give you skins because fig leaves aren't going to keep you warm in the cold of where you're going.
17:34
Chris Jones: They're not going to protect you from the thorns and the other things that can hurt you, the elements.
17:40
Chris Jones: Let me give you these skins.
17:43
Chris Jones: God is still trying to help Adam and Eve, even though they have separated themselves from him by believing the lies of a serpent and taking on a new God, themselves.
17:56
Chris Jones: When Jesus from a cross gives us the antidote to the poison and the fruit that would come from him, which is us, he is making himself the tree of life.
18:08
Chris Jones: But it's in that suffering that we have communion with God and our suffering of the condition of being separated, that we are reconciled back to God through the suffering of Jesus, the tree of life.
18:22
Chris Jones: So to Susan and Ryan Ingler, I hope that answers the question of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
18:28
Chris Jones: I mean, ultimately, I think the serpent represents an outside agent that came in and spoke to our pride, that we could put our throne above everyone else's with God's and sit in judgment of other people.
18:40
Chris Jones: I mean, when you start defining good and evil, that's kind of what you're doing.
18:45
Chris Jones: You are making yourself like God.
18:47
Chris Jones: That's why I call it the serpent's venom.
18:49
Chris Jones: The serpent's venom is pride.
18:51
Chris Jones: It's arrogance, it's ego.
18:53
Chris Jones: It's what allows us to feel like we are important and we are entitled to go get what we want without thinking of other people's needs.
19:03
Chris Jones: Guys, this is the lens of the here and now.
19:06
Chris Jones: There's more to this, but for now, this is where we're going to leave it.
19:09
Chris Jones: All right, so I've got an announcement that I need to make everybody aware of.
19:13
Chris Jones: Spiritual hot sauce will no longer be doing a weekly release.
19:19
Chris Jones: It will be moving to every other week.
19:22
Chris Jones: Going forward after today, that means next Thursday, there will not be a new episode.
19:28
Chris Jones: It will be the Thursday after that.
19:30
Chris Jones: It's going to be dropping every other week.
19:32
Chris Jones: And as far as the bonus dab of the sauce, it's not going to be a scheduled thing.
19:37
Chris Jones: It will just be happening as it needs to happen.
19:39
Chris Jones: But you know, when I started this podcast, I wanted it to be something that could help people and actually do a service, not just create content.
19:49
Chris Jones: Sometimes I think I've strayed from that a little bit.
19:51
Chris Jones: And I want to kind of get things pulled back in and stay the course of where I feel like we are actually doing some good.
19:59
Chris Jones: And I haven't done anything you're supposed to do to promote your podcast.
20:04
Chris Jones: You really don't find me out on social media anywhere talking about or releasing clips.
20:09
Chris Jones: Although I do have a Facebook page.
20:11
Chris Jones: And if you haven't got over there, get over there.
20:13
Chris Jones: But I really don't do anything other than that.
20:15
Chris Jones: I don't do anything to promote.
20:16
Chris Jones: I don't ask for money.
20:17
Chris Jones: I don't have a Patreon account.
20:19
Chris Jones: I am just doing what I can because I feel like it's the right thing.
20:23
Chris Jones: But that means I am completely reliant upon you to follow me on the platform that you listen to me.
20:29
Chris Jones: So if you listen to the sauce on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or whatever it is you listen to, then follow me.
20:37
Chris Jones: And the big one is share me with other people.
20:39
Chris Jones: Let's get the word out.
20:40
Chris Jones: Because again, I don't promote.
20:43
Chris Jones: You are my plan.
20:46
Chris Jones: But I feel like we're doing the right thing here.
20:49
Chris Jones: So, guys, thank you so much.
20:51
Chris Jones: I appreciate it.
20:52
Chris Jones: And I will see you not this coming Thursday, not a week from today, but the following Thursday, two weeks from today.
21:00
Chris Jones: Love you guys.
21:01
Chris Jones: See you then.